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The unfitness of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford is exposed in court documents: Editorial

Wed., March 19, 2014

It has long been obvious that Toronto Mayor Rob Ford is an unsavory character. Fresh court documents, released by Justice Ian Nordheimer on Wednesday, don’t paint a different picture but they do add touches of colour that round out an ugly portrait.

They show a mayor whose conduct and pattern of communication are “indicative to that of drug trafficking,” according to police officers watching Ford and his friend, accused drug dealer Alexander “Sandro” Lisi. This pattern would be shocking in any public official, never mind the chief magistrate of Canada’s largest city.

Officers describe a video in their possession depicting Ford “consuming what appears to be a narcotic” by putting a glass cylinder to his lips, applying flame to its tip and inhaling the resulting vapour. It’s the notorious crack cocaine video that Ford claimed didn’t exist before finally confessing to smoking the drug on learning this footage was in police hands.

It’s the video Ford has repeatedly said he wanted to see. The rank hypocrisy of that claim was underlined by court documents revealing that police offered to show it to Ford, but he turned down the opportunity to look at it.

The only condition imposed on Ford was that he not comment on or discuss contents of the video in order to protect his friend Lisi’s right to a fair trial.

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Elsewhere in the documents, Mohamed Siad, the man who allegedly made the infamous video, brags about recording the mayor’s wrongdoing. Police report him saying that this is how to “catch a mayor smoking crack.”

Given Ford’s pattern of bizarre conduct — including a video taken on St. Patrick’s weekend showing him shouting in the street and uttering an obscenity — his camp has taken to saying what the mayor does in his off-hours shouldn’t matter. The folly of such claims is exposed by Siad’s gloating. Committing an illegal act in the presence of such a man, even in private, would expose any public official to risk of blackmail. And Ford walks right into the trap, too deep in what he has called one of his “stupors” to avoid disaster.

What’s amazing is that so damaged a political figure insists on running for re-election, even ludicrously claiming that he’s the best mayor in Toronto’s history.

These latest court documents don’t give us a new image of Ford. But they do reinforce the sad, pathetic picture we already had.

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